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June 16, 2012

As the high-end wine market confronts the problem of counterfeiting, a professional wine "detective" and sommelier explains how she identifies counterfeit wines:

fraud detection has nothing to do with the taste of a wine, Downey says. “If you’ve got something that’s been in a bottle for 40 or 50 or 100 years, there’s going to be bottle variation.” [...] nobody on the planet has so much experience with these incredibly rare wines that they can say with any degree of accuracy, ‘Oh yeah, this is correct Petrus from 1920.’ Bulls–t.” If taste told the tale, she points out, Kurniawan never would have pulled off the giant con he’s now charged with.

Downey’s approach when studying bottles and preparing authentication reports for clients is more about forensics than flavor. She takes into account paper stock, printing quality, and the oxidation rate of label paper...brings to bear historical knowledge about tin capsules and what colors of glass were used to bottle what brands when. “If you see a bottle where the label looks like hell but the capsule looks pristine, that’s like a 20-year-old’s body with a 90-year-old’s face,” she says. “They should have aged together. These are all errors that counterfeiters make.”

This sounds more like identifying cultured pearls than like identifying fake bike helmets or adulterated food. But if copying the taste of the great brands is possible for good forgers, one is left with a puzzle. iPads and Louis Vuitton bags can certainly be faked, and there are people who participate in that illegal activity, but they can also be knocked offlegally via products that are designed to look and behave basically the same, but don't try to mimic exactly or dupe the customer into paying the premium for a fake product. There should be if anything more of this in markets where taste is the only objective (as in non-prestige) quality of value. So where are the knock-off Chateau Lafite's and Famous Teas and civet coffees where they save money by using cats or goats or something? Brands that say "we are very similar to the famous brands, but cost about a tenth, and are good enough that only experts and 'detectives' can tell us apart from the real deal. For $large/10 you can experience what the aristocrats and billionaires and movie stars drink" Or do they exist?

March 26, 2012

I recently made a short but pleasant trip to Lucknow, a north Indian city with a diverse and varied history of song, dance and political intrigue. Lucknow is also famous for its fine cuisine which developed to please the discerning palates of its luxury loving Nawabs. The rulers, appointed by the Mughal kings of Delhi and Agra were of Iranian origin and the royal chefs developed a class of food that is both rich as well as delicately balanced for high flavor. I wish to share some of the photos I took around the city with our readers. Rather than go into the complicated historical details of the place, I will instead share an essay by Sachin Kalbag about Lucknow's famous foods. The article was published in Mail Today, when the newspaper had been newly launched and its website was not quite user-friendly. It is only accessible to me in the PDF format, I can't therefore provide a link. I am reproducing it in its entirety with the permission of the author. Kalbag refers to some of Lucknow's famous landmarks which also appear in my photo montage.

The pictures here are of buildings commissioned by the Shi'a rulers of Lucknow, dating from the 18th century, designed by Iranian engineers and constructed by Indian laborers, masons and craftsmen. Clearly representing the Muslim architectural style, the beautiful edifices were heavily influenced by the artistic sensibilities of the Indian workers as well as existing local architecture of pre-Islamic era. In fact during that period, given the high traffic of Persian notables to the Mughal courts, the exchange of architectural design and aesthetics most probably flowed in both directions - from Iran to India and back. This notion is supported by the comment by an Iranian friend who saw the Lucknow photos on my Facebook. She doesn't claim any expertise in the area but noted the following from her observations.

These are fascinating, Ruchira! Except for the corridor of the Bhool Bhulaiya and some general impressions of that kind of blending of interior/exterior space like the doggie in the window picture, it's striking how different they are from architecture in Iran of that period, which I suppose says much for the influence of the Indian craftsmen and how the engineers must have been impressed by what they encountered in India. If anything, some of it reminds me more of Qajar period in Iran, slightly later. Perhaps they brought back some ideas from India?

(Click on the Wiki links for the history of the monuments featured below and on the images for enlargement)

Bada Imambada: The larger of the two famous Imambadas (The monument of the Imam) of Lucknow. Built in the mid 18th century by the Shia ruler of Lucknow as a tribute to Imam Hassan, the monument was designed by Iranian engineers and constructed by Indian laborers.

The main entrance to the Bada (large) Imambada

The view from inside the intricate structure around the deep well

The Bauli - the several stories deep well in the compound

The Tajia Hall

The beautifully carved ceiling of the Tajia Hall. The holy banners in the first alcove on the right

A passage within the Bhool Bhulaiya, the maze

A view of the Rumi Darwaza (The Roman Gate) outside

A building across the street with a fish motif (the elephant is live)

Chhota Imambada:The beautiful, delicately designed Chhota Imambara, a monument dedicated to Imam Hussain. It was built in the late 18th century by the ruling Shia dynasty of Lucknow. As with the its larger counterpart, this edifice too was designed by Iranian architects and built by local Indian laborers and masons.

A charming pair at the entrance. The metal female figure is a lightning conductor and the golden fish is the equivalent of a wind sock.

The Chhota Imambara

A jacuzzi bath for the women of the royal family on the premises.

The mausoleum of theNawab's daughter.

The lace like design and calligraphy on the front wall of the Imambada.

A scenic shot within the complex. Lucknow has a rich and varied assortment of botanical life.

The mosque at the Chhota Imambara.

The Residency at Lucknow (a major site of the Sepoy Mutiny, India's first war of independence against British occupation)

A memorial before the dining hall to commemorate British soldiers

Bullet holes on the walls of the Residency.

A memorial to Indian soldiers who sided with the British.

The boundary wall of a building in the compound

The burnt out quarters where Sir Henry Lawrence, the commander of the British forces died.

The remnants of the church of the Residency and the surrounding cemetery.

A British gun.

The mosque of the Residency. It is still in use.

The last Nawab of Oudh (Lucknow was its capital), Wajid Ali Shah. The hapless, pleasure loving, apathetic ruler was removed from power and exiled in Calcutta by the British just a year before the Mutiny, in preparation for the take over of Lucknow and the kingdom of Oudh.

March 09, 2012

Move over, BPA, make room for the new kid on the block: 4- MI ( the 'cute' name for 4-methylimidazole), a byproduct of the process used to create one of the coloring agents used in what is obliquely termed 'caramel color' on the ingredients list of many processed foods, most notably sodas like Coca Cola and Pepsi.

The Center for Science in Public Interest had submitted a docket to the FDA, requesting that the caramel colorings with 4-MI be banned, but can claim success of a different sort from what it had hoped. Because of regulations in the state of California, where Coke and Pepsi would have had to label their drinks with warnings similar to "This product contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm."

If it causes cancer in California, surely, it must cause cancer elsewhere. Ah, the power of truth in advertisement, and the things manufacturers will do in order to not have to issue disclaimers that their product contains substances that are considered carcinogens, even it is only in California. Or is the fear that they could be sued in California by any private citizen or group over the 4-MI in their formulation? This article sheds more light on their concerns.

"Our member companies will still use caramel coloring in certain products, as always. The companies that make caramel coloring for our members' soft drinks are producing it to meet California's new standard,” the beverage association said in a separate statement.

“Consumers will notice no difference in our products and have no reason at all for any health concerns.”

The question is still up in the air as to whether the results of lab tests that show that 4-MI is indeed carcinogenic in lab rats, at high concentrations that far exceed the normal levels that even the most avid drinker of sodas would be exposed to, can be used to argue that 4-MI in caramel color is indeed responsible for a variety of cancers in the population ingesting it. My guess is that at best, it would be one of a gazillion contributing factors towards any cancers that did develop.

August 02, 2011

Why do we watch food shows on TV? For a variety of reasons, as varied as the different offerings on the likes of The Food Network and The Learning Channel, analyzed to exhaustion by Akim Reinhardt on 3QD.

I've come to the conclusion that I hate cooking, and would be entirely happy if I never had to lift a finger in the kitchen. Why then does my remote-clicking finger seep into paralysis when it reaches the Food Network?

There's no dearth of gorgeous, tastefully arranged plates of food, faux drama, foodie discussions with lines read straight off the teleprompter. These are all actors purveying a story and concept to the TV audience. "You too can get off the couches and start cooking like the Great Chefs, or the Bounteous Babushkas, or the Bulimic Bombshells."

It's less of Buon Appetito, and more of the triumph of Mindless over Matter.

May 11, 2011

By accident--this is, after all, the Accidental Blogger--two stories from major news outlets came my way, both in relevant part pertaining to domestic amenities, kitchen conveniences in particular. I don't often read the real estate or dining pages. Now I'm reminded why.

With rare exceptions, I can't stomach food writing. A story in yesterday's New York Times (beware the paywall) is a perfect example of putrid journalism parading as insightful, novel human interest. Essentially, two pages of precious web journalism copy space are occupied by fluff about Indian cookery. Don't get me wrong. I love tandoori cooking, which I first learned about in, oh, around 1986 (India's Oven, Los Angeles). This story finds interesting the fact that some guy, who now runs a business manufacturing tandoor ovens for home use, hadn't heard about it until...1986. That's 25 years ago. We learn that Madhur Jaffrey, whom I first heard about in, I dunno, the '90s, maybe, heard about it only as recently as 1947. How is this news? Or even interesting?

The tandoor may have originated in Rajasthan, India, where archeologists have found tandoor remains dating from 2600 B.C. — about the same time as the pyramids. The first tandoors were used to bake flatbread, a tradition that survives in Indian roti, Afghan naan and Turkmen chorek.

Visit a bakery on the teeming Chandni Chowk in Old Delhi — or any Indian restaurant, for that matter — and you will see fresh naan being made to order. Soft white balls of yeasted dough are rolled into flat cakes, which are draped over a round cloth pillow called a gadhi and pressed onto the hot inner walls of the tandoor, where they puff, blister and brown in minutes.

The searing heat and smoke, and moisture-retaining properties of the tandoor, make it equally effective for roasting meat on vertical skewers, a delicacy mentioned by the Indian surgeon Sushruta as early as the eighth century B.C. Shah Jahan, the Mughal emperor who built the Taj Mahal, held the tandoor in such high esteem he had a portable metal model constructed to take on his travels.

In spite of its ancient origins and utter simplicity, the tandoor produces startlingly sophisticated results, including smoky flatbreads that puff like pillows, and roasted meats of uncommon succulence.

And what is this baloney? "In spite of its ancient origins and utter simplicity, the tandoor produces startlingly sophisticated results, including smoky flatbreads that puff like pillows, and roasted meats of uncommon succulence." Such condescension to those dumb, unsophisticated ancient originals! "Uncommon succulence" sounds downright dirty.

So the core of the story is: some ceramics guy in Florida was approached by some NY Indian restaurant owner who wanted a homemade tandoor. Floridan made it and parlayed his success into a business. Now he knows more about tandoors than your average diner at an Indian restaurant. And now he sells a unit for home use. Ah, American ingenuity!

Then there's thisHouston Chronicle piece about homebuilding and "diversity."

Ramesh Bhutada didn't plan on moving. However, when his son married a few years ago, he knew the growing family needed more space to keep living together.

He bought a 5,000 square-foot house in Sugar Land with a second master bedroom upstairs for the newly wed couple, an option the builder, Perry Homes, offered.

"We knew they would want their privacy, and this way we can still enjoy living together," said Bhutada, whose family is among South Asian buyers requesting additional master bedrooms. "Our grandchild is on the way at anytime now, so it will be a lot of fun for us as grandparents to have a little kid around."

Carrying over a tradition from their native countries, some South Asian children live with their parents until they marry and then often live with the groom's parents after marriage.

In the Houston area, such cultural norms have builders responding to the region's diversity by incorporating special design demands into homes. Aside from extra bedrooms, they're adding secondary kitchens and prayer rooms that appeal to South Asians and courtyards popular with Hispanic buyers.

The changes haven't yet become a common part of most standard home plans, but more builders are accommodating well-heeled buyers who ask for such features.

So, South Asian families are demanding additional master bedrooms in the homes of the parents of newlywed grooms, into which the married youngsters can move. On the one hand, and despite my disdain for the awful convention we call family, I do believe families should live together in extended configurations. (My wife and I are raising two kids, one a newborn, with no family nearby to help.) So, I think there's nothing weird at all about the newlyweds moving upstairs. On the other hand, I myself find home ownership unheimlich, disturbing. My preference would be for widespread communal living and widely shared responsibility for raising kids. (This in no way reflects the opinions of my wife and two children.)

The article goes on to describe a vile status-seeking development in home design around the kitchen, ostensibly one respecting "diverse" needs of other cultures, the construction of two kitchens, one for show, the other for the "dirty" work of cooking. The show kitchen feature is, to me, pure capitalist cancer. I wish food poisoning on those who demand them. I don't think there's anything wrong with using multiple spaces to prepare meals (or, say, to brew beer), but installing a kitchen as an ornament is obnoxious.

I dunno. Maybe one day soon slow news days, like slow cooking, will be all the rage.

January 19, 2011

The ubiquity of upscale cafes and beaneries in the urban landscape obscures the grudging awareness in America, over time, of a good cup of coffee. In an upbeat song from '69 that Carmen McRae later perfected, it was the just the next best thing ... Just a little lovin', early in the mornin' Beats a cup of coffee for startin' off the day. Just a little lovin', when the world is yawnin', Makes you wake up feelin' good things are coming your way... far better at least than the dirge of Ella's Black Coffee, 'a hand-me-down brew' reminiscent of the swill of that period, rendered even more disreputable by its association with cigarettes and jazz.

At the time, grocers carried a handful of brands and I had to go to a hardware store to buy my first percolator, a flimsy aluminum contraption. Local hardware stores were still around when Mr. Coffee made his appearance some years later and made one dependent on filter paper. I gave that a pass and bought a pot that was a household version of Bunn coffee makers, once common in diners, that forced boiling water up a funnel into an upper chamber containing the grounds, then allowed it to drip through with the heat turned low. When that broke, I found that Corning has discontinued the product and got myself a more substantial percolator, a stainless steel wonder that regulated itself. Next, the French press made its appearance. I couldn't master it and soon gave up. Bialetti introduced their stovetop espresso makers to America and I put my percolator away. They survive to this day if only because of their routine appearance in European films. I ran through a bunch of them until electric versions hit the shelves in appliance stores. From there it was a short hop to justifying the outlay of a few hundred bucks for a real espresso machine. America and I had arrived.

All the while, in the land of my birth, tastes in coffee had followed the opposite trajectory.

January 07, 2011

Christopher Hitchens tells us "How To Make a Decent Cup of Tea," HERE.

by Norman Costa

In my American life I have only had a few cups of tea that I found delicious and enjoyable, and mostly in the last couple of years. I never understood the fuss over tea in other parts of the world, notably the United Kingdom. The Pommies are famous, in times of war, for pausing to make tea after they landed an invasion force on a beach head. Remarkably, they would stop for their infusion even before the landing beaches were secure for the next wave.

I thought I understood the national obsessions with tea in China, Japan, South and South East Asia, because I thought it was more tradition and local economics, coupled with ritual and religion (in some cases.) As for why the Russians came to elevate "nice glass tea" to a national drink, second only to vodka, was a total mystery to me.

With my limited and unexciting relationship with tea (almost always tea bags and only occasionally with a teapot,) I concluded the fuss was more about culture, nationalism, and a lifetime effort of coming to believe that one really liked it. Some of you are thinking, "What the hell does he know about tea?" Happily, I have concluded, "Not much."

Armed with the knowledge of my own ignorance, I am ready to pour the tea of knowledge into an empty part of my brain that is reserved for tea. It is proof of God's existence that she knew I was ready to learn about the joys and satisfations associated with imbibing an infusion. When you are ready to learn, a teacher knocks at your door. In my case, his name is Christopher Hitchens, and he would take exception to knowing that he was sent to deliver knowledge, truth, and pleasure by a thoughtful decision from a supernatural curriculum adviser and teacher trainer.

So, how well has he done his job? I will let you know, after a period of apprenticeship and serving others. In the meantime, you may want to critique Chris' lesson plan and instruction notes. You decide if his work was divinely inspired, or if the divine needs some inspiration from yourself.

For any of you Godless people, out there, one might conclude there is nothing supernatural involved in making a good cup of tea, and offer as proof the instruction you received from your favorite auntie when you were only 7 years old. We might learn that the divine spark that was nested in your auntie was lovingly imparted to you in a way that could on be described as spiritual. Now you can share your divine wisdom with the rest of us.

October 13, 2010

"Los Angeles County is moving to submit its flock of 9,500 food trucks and carts to the same health department rules as restaurants — including requiring them to prominently post a letter grade based on food inspections — in what may be the ultimate sign that this faddiest of food fads is going mainstream."

For the first twenty-some years of my life no meat ever passed these lips. This must sound more dramatic than my saying that I grew up vegetarian, especially if you factor in the notion I have that it is positively Jesuitical to distinguish between meat and fish (if you prick them, do they not bleed?). Not just meat, for I grew up with an otherwise irreligious father who was brahmaniacal about anything to do with the "other" - to wit, the mlechha. That meant NO STREET FOOD, manna to Indian children, let alone eating at non-veg friends' houses.

So I recall with nostalgia the sporadic appearance of a tall mustachioed fellow in our alley. "Ma, Ma, soan-papdi-walla's here!" My mother would swear us to secrecy and splurge for a few ounces of this ethereal artisanal delicacy to be scarfed in the scant hour before Baba came home from work. After a gap of forty years I rediscovered a sanitized version of this guilty pleasure at an Indian store, sadly, often congealed from the experience of being hermetically packaged and sent halfway across the globe without benefit of the flies that soan-papdi-vala had to constantly fend off. Still. we have this rave (albeit with the wrong image) from gustator par excellence Joyce E. Fink at Amazon.com -

"Haldirams Soan Papdi: I was given a box of these flaky sweets by a friend from Bahrain and found them to be absolutely devine [sic]. So glad to have found them online so that I can order some to give as gifts to my other friends."

For our salty cravings we had chana-choor, dispensed, from a pushcart stationed outside the gate of our school, by a mustachioed pocket Hercules we knew only as pehelwan who had reputedly served time for murder. A generous squeeze of lime on the roasted gram, chili, onion and (proprietary) spice concoction, served up in a cup made of dried leaves, would be an extra two pice. In place of such small town fare, all that Bombay had to offer in my college years were gol-guppa and bhel-puri dished out by anonymous people of no distinction.

It's the daring vegetarian Indian who comes to the west and samples tandoori chicken and imagines pleasure to palliate the guilt. Why bother, say I. Such bland food must have been invented for the sole purpose of suckering gora-log into thinking "orientalism". Shortly before leaving India I was with some friends in a Kanpur baazaar with a beer too many and a hunger to match. I pointed to the fiercest looking stuff on a pushcart and minutes later I was officially non-veg. My mouth was burning, my brain awash with the mixed messages of satiation and original sin. My mlechha friends informed me that I had eaten liver. After that, how could I ever stomach chicken in any form, I ask you?

And yet the most memorable meal I've had was neither delicacy nor treyf. Four of us were celebrating college graduation with a rough tour of the foothills of Himachal Pradesh. At one point we were on a bleak minor highway with no rides in sight and stomachs protesting, when along comes this old villager with a pushcart. He spoke neither Hindi nor Punjabi but we managed to chat him up somehow. He was the official chuck-wagon for the road repair crews of those parts and he had enough left over for us. We were charged by the roti, all the rest was thrown in. He fed us the staple of potato and cauliflower curry garnished with ghee, raw onions, green chilis, and dipping salt. We couldn't have fared better in town, and at country prices too.

I have this ditty to remind me of that grand meal :

Aloo, mutter, gobi / Hum saab, tum dhobi.

... which loses everything when translated to :

Potato, peas, cauliflower / Me boss, you laundryman

And somehow, this song fragment seems appropriate too :

Supe que lo sencillo no es lo necio

Que no hay que confundir valor y precio

Y un majar puede ser cualquier bocado

Si el horizonte es luz y el rumbo es beso.

... which I translate very freely as :

I know the simple aren’t cause for mirth

That price must not be seen for worth,

And every morsel can a delicacy be

If the horizon's lit and the course be kissed.

Do you have some stories about what my Bombay neighbors used to call "thrash food"?

(Editor's note:Narayan's nostalic musings about street food were inspired by this article in the NYT.)

Glossary of Indian words:

Soan Papdi: a very flaky pastry like sweet made from gram flour, sugar, clarified butter and pistachio nuts.

Chana-Choor: A salt and spicy mixture of whole and flattened roasted chick peas.

pehelwan: a muscle man

gora-log: people of European origin

roti: south Asian flat, unleavened bread, usually made of whole wheat flour.

September 19, 2010

When a Detroit minister named Mayowa Lisa Reynolds went to her City Council last summer to complain about malt liquor advertising, she came prepared.The minister had conducted a survey in which she found a Colt .45 billboard in every square mile of the city. She looked in the nearby, majority white suburbs of Plymouth and Royal Oak.There were none.

Still, the Colt .45 billboards were relatively inoffensive by the traditional standards of malt liquor advertising.In one notorious 1986 print spot for Midnight Dragon, a voluptuous woman grasped a squat 40 ounce bottle above the tagline “I could suck on this all night.”In the 90s, charismatic gangster rappers incorporated 40s into their tales of murder and drug-dealing, driving malt liquor sales to all-time highs. In contrast, the 2009 Colt .45 ads merely featured a cartoon drawing of longtime spokesman Billy Dee Williams dressed in mauve and beige evening wear, accompanied by the slogan, “Works Every Time.”

Reynolds needn’t have worried. Several council members went ballistic at her findings. Alberta Tinsley-Talabi, who created a “Denounce the 40 Ounce Campaign” in the 90s to reduce alcohol consumption in Detroit, fumed that “every 20 years we have to start this fight again.” Reynolds pondered the meaning of “works every time.” “If women drink it, ladies will lose their virginity?” she asked. Councilwoman JoAnn Watson brought out the heaviest rhetorical guns: “This is killing our community. It’s an issue of racism and perversity.” (David Josar, "Detroit council takes aim at Billy Dee Williams malt liquor ads," The Detroit News, July 7, 2009).

For someone who knew nothing about the history of malt liquor, such strong denunciations might seem excessive. Racism and perversity? The Colt .45 billboards in Detroit are hardly more outlandish than other kinds of beer advertising.

But the anger from Tinsley-Talabi and Watson are not atypical.In the summer of 2008, at a Philadelphia bike shop called Jay’s Pedal Power, community protests forced the painting-over of a different graffitti-style billboard of young partiers drinking Colt .45.In June 2009, Colt .45 bus-shelter ads in St. Louis brought protests that the company was seducing young African-Americans into a life of alcoholism."If you look at the black community, the only thing that's advertised is cigarettes and alcohol. Period," alderman Charles Quincy Troupe told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. "There's nothing that's advertised that puts forth any wellness."

Malt liquor clearly bears a stigma with African-Americans.But with the current “reboot” of an aging and stigmatized brand, Colt .45 is also trying to sell to a different demographic group, a group of people that sometimes appears to lack historical memory of anything that happened before last Tuesday: hipsters.

Like an earnest Mom trying to connect with her teenagers by using the latest slang, Colt .45 is communicating with the kids in a language that they will understand.And some of the efforts are impressive.The company has dialed-in promoters putting on parties and concerts in New York and L.A. with hot bands of the moment, like Das Racist, War Tapes, and the Rapture – with Colt .45 served on the house.Whatever your principles, it’s hard to turn down free booze and music, especially in the middle of a brutal recession.

Some of the other tactics are less auspicious.There’s the bizarre schwag, like special edition brown bags or a Colt .45 unisex robe (available now for just 30 dollars).And some painfully unclever cartoons, as when a young man seduces a total stranger, who has just had a terrible fight with her boyfriend, merely by knocking on her door and giving her a can of malt liquor. (Unless your taste runs to poverty-stricken alcoholics, courtship tends to be a bit more complicated than that, even in these informal times).In a different cartoon scenario with vague echoes of Buckwheat from The Little Rascals, a group of partygoers discover that they have run out of Colt .45 – until noticing that one resourceful drunk has squirreled away a dozen cans in his Afro.They’re forced to attack him to get their fair share.

The humorous portrayals of problem drinking are the work of a young white graphic artist named Jim Mahfood, who hails from the macrobrewery company town of St. Louis.On a promotional video produced by Colt .45’s ad agency Cole & Weber United, Mahfood explains the concept behind the campaign:

"The general vibe, of like, Colt .45, or even drinking 40s?…It just reminds me of being at art school, and people having like, a spontaneous party on the campus lawn, and just people drinking 40s and listening to a ghetto-blaster…When I was able to tell all my friends, especially my friends I went to art school with, that I was doing this campaign? And my comic book label was called "40 Ounce Comics?" I feel like I've been rewarded for all those years of drinking malt liquor."(Cole & Weber United website, accessed October 1, 2009)

The artist's life turns out to be not so tough -- so long as you jettison any pretensions to originality or having something to say.

Companies are not always so ham-handed when it comes to marketing products to hipsters. The journalist Christian Lorentzen may have concluded that “hipsters” don’t actually exist, but Madison Avenue certainly thinks that they do. That's not praise, so much as an observation – advertisers are clearly targeting hipsters, a group loosely defined as young people with relative pop cultural sophistication, a surface detachment from middle-class values, and a love of kitsch and retro styles.

The resuscitation of Pabst Blue Ribbon offers the best example of how subtle the Don Drapers of today can be. P.B.R. went from a beer known for being cheap and bland and in seeming terminal decline in 2001, to a brand known for being cheap and bland that has increased sales by over 25% since 2008, in spite of raising prices in the middle of a recession.That’s on top of a roughly 60% increase in sales between 2001 and 2006, due to a stealth marketing campaign astutely analyzed by Rob Walker in his book Buying In.

As Walker shows, P.B.R. grew precisely because of the lack of overt marketing. A group of bike messengers, skaters, punks, and others who identified with P.B.R.’s low price and vaguely blue-collar image were also attracted by the fact that the beer’s corporate parent didn’t seem to care enough about it to run endless T.V. ads or miles of billboards.(Never mind that the actual owners were uniformly white-collar, having summarily fired 250 Milwaukee brewery workers and outsourced production to Miller in 2001 – PBR is a “virtual” brand that exists only as a marketing and distribution entity).When Kid Rock’s lawyer noticed the young, hard edged drinkers drawn to P.B.R., and thought that that his client might make an excellent spokesman, the company rebuffed his overtures. Instead, P.B.R. continued its unobtrusive promotions, like skateboard movie screenings, art gallery openings, indie publishing events, and the "West Side Invite,” where Portland messengers drank beer and played “bike polo” together – but without pushing the brand using ostentatious posters or signs.

Alex Wipperfürth, who consulted for P.B.R. during those years and has written a book that draws on his findings, describes P.B.R. customers as engaging in “lifestyle as dissent” and “consumption as protest” – embracing this seemingly forlorn beer as a kind of expression of “no future” solidarity. P.B.R. succeeded by willfully keeping its marketing efforts as neutral as possible, to perpetuate the beer’s underdog image.

Buying P. B. R. is not much of a form of dissent, in comparison with, say, marching across the bridge at Selma or smuggling in food to Anne Frank, but it is dissent nevertheless. As Walker observes, buying the P.B.R. beer brand, owned by a large holding company, is hardly a way to strike back against corporations – but it is a way to protest against the phony hilarity and brand saturation of conventional marketing. Incredibly, Pabst marketing whiz Neal Stewart shaped his unconventional campaign by reading Naomi Klein’s 2000 book No Logo. After finishing Klein’s impassioned protest against the pervasiveness of corporate brands, Stewart concluded, "Hey, there are all these people out there who hate marketing – and we should sell to them."

Though Pabst is in the same family of brands as Colt .45, the patronizing cartoons and that silly bathrobe suggest that Cole & Weber United hasn’t learned the lessons of subtlety in selling to young people who loathe pandering advertising campaigns.The central conceit of the hipster is that his bullshit-detector and cultural awareness render him too much of a special snowflake to be targeted by some agency’s dorky creative team.But even were Cole and Weber to replicate some of P.B.R.’s clever moves, it would be hard for it to replicate their results.Colt. 45 is not just another beer, as Watson’s accusation of “racism and perversity” suggests.

Instead of the vaguely blue-collar but essentially blank canvas on which hipsters can project a “no future” image, Colt .45 and malt liquor offer a very particular history.Originally invented during the Depression as a way to make a potent brew cheaply, by replacing some of the expensive malt used in conventional beer with less expensive dextrose, and using heartier yeast strains that result in more alcohol and less flavor, malt liquor has been eclipsed by its marketing.In the 1980s and 90s, malt liquor became a way for brewers to bottle black stereotypes and sell them, in a pomo echo of the minstrel tradition.

August 18, 2010

Coffee at Starbucks. It's advertised in three sizes. What wasn't obvious to me is that the sizes actually contain different concentrations of coffee. A tall (12 oz.) coffee has a shot of coffee, as does a grande (16 oz.), but the venti (20 oz.) coffee has two coffee-shots. So, depending on which size you get, you get volume-to-coffee ratios of 12 oz./shot, 16 oz./shot and 10 oz/shot.

Now of course there's nothing inherent in the taste of lattemedium that should make it best served in medium-sized portions. The form of the lattesmall does not come equipped with an intrinsic volume-scale. In fact, you should be able to buy each of coffeesmall, coffeemedium and coffeelarge in sizes small, medium and large as desired. Think of it: you really like the especially mild and milky flavor of lattemedium, sufficiently in fact to to
want it in the large size. A largelattemedium, so to speak. For when mediumlattemedium just isn't enough. Or maybe the robust heartiness of largemochalarge is appealing, but who wants that much coffee? Is not the mediummochalarge a worthy alternative? Coffee is not a univariate entity - no, it is inherently a matrix-type proposition. It seems to me Starbucks underserves us by offering us only the diagonal coffee-elements, and compounds the error by identifying the elements, as if a lattemedium were merely a jumbo version of the lattesmall.

I have great trouble convincing people of the essential awesomeness of the proposed scheme; somehow people - even those fluent in the half-syrup-half-caramel-one-percent-macchiato-with-cinnamon lingo - seem to find this a bit complicated. Me, I think a world with grid-valued coffee types, in which people had to think with 3x3 matrices every time they ordered a cuppa, would be a happier place in all of the best ways.

February 10, 2010

Brinjals, or aubergines or eggplant, as they are variously called in different parts of the world, are the center of a major brouhaha over biotech crops and their introduction in India, one of the most lucrative markets for seeds in the world.

Bowing to the pressure of numerous activists and at least 10 state governments, the Indian environment minister Jairam Ramesh has declared a moratorium on the introduction of the Bt Brinjal into the Indian agroproduct market.

Despite the concerns of the growing biotech industry in India, this moratorium is backed by no less a personage than Dr. M.Swaminatha one of the founding fathers of the 'Green Revolution' in India that did away with dependency on food imports. From The Hindu:

"Agriculture scientist and Rajya Sabha member M.S. Swaminathan on
Tuesday described the government’s moratorium on commercialisation of
Mahyco’s Bt brinjal until independent studies established its safety,
as “a wise and appropriate decision.”

He said it was appropriate not to hurry and to look at the problems
to the satisfaction of all. The government should utilise the time to
put in place a credible, effective and transparent system for the
benefit of the country and conduct tests in a manner that had public
trust".

Other voices had been earlier raised in protest against what was termed 'inadequate research' of the effects of Bt Brinjal consumption in animal models, prominent among them scientist Gilles-Eric Selarini.

From the concluding lines in his report:

"This Bt brinjal release in the environment includes major risks. It is
not serious to give to billions of people and animals for their entire
life a food / feed that has not been tested more than 3 months with
blood analyses. We do not know the long term consequences of the
genetic modification itself nor the effects of the modified insecticide
toxin produced at very high levels. Moreover there were clear signs of
hepatorenal toxicities, among other effects, shown within 90 days by
significant differences in Mahyco's toxicological subchronic tests in
mammals: goats, rats and rabbits. These are not clear proofs because
the tests are too short, but preoccupying enough to forbid Bt brinjal
release at this stage."

While it's heartening that the Indian government is responsive enough to these concerns prior to full-blown introduction of the crop into the Indian ecosystem, it may have already made its way into existing varieties through improper isolation techniques for the test farms.

"When proper refugia standards are not followed, contamination can
result from the cross-flow of pollen between Bt and non-Bt varieties.
The result may be new genetic combinations that fail to express the Bt
toxin enough for adequate protection from the bollworm.

Preliminary analysis by CICR in Nagpur, which has monitored
resistance to the Bt toxin for the past five years, shows that one in
every 667 bollworms in north India, one in every 440 in central India
and one in every 400 in south India is resistant to Bt toxin." (emphases mine)

It will take a DNA battle of sorts between the existing varieties to determine the genetic victor of all the crosspollination and insect resistance evolution patterns. The results may not be anything we can predict.

April 27, 2009

Kosher Coke is great, so isn't it even better if there are more such options? I was at Target today and saw a couple of interesting new Pepsi products: Pepsi Throwback and Mountain Dew Throwback, "made with natural sugar."

Sadly, it looks like these may not stick around: they're scheduled to be available only until June 13. But if the response is positive enough, who knows? They're not going to leave money on the table if they think it's there to be had!

I have been sitting on a couple of blog posts that I wanted to expand upon since they appeared on 3 Quarks Daily on the same day in the beginning of March. Both pertain to food, both are written by Indian born authors who muse on Asian food habits and their relation to religion, culture and the versatility of the human taste buds.

The first article is written by Namit Arora who is familiar to our readers through his comments and blog linked on A.B. Namit took his readers through the eating habits of two large Asian countries - India and China, geographic neighbors with ancient histories and vastly disparate culinary cultures. He focuses on the prevalent natural, religious, and philosophical climates that may have influenced the choice of food of the two peoples, in particular, meat eating and vegetarianism. Read the article and comments below and see if you find the arguments convincing. Although Namit did not address the morality of eating meat in this article, I know that he had the thought in mind (he admitted to me as much in an email) as I myself do occasionally. If I were to ponder this issue, the practice of killing animals for food or other consumer products, I will have to answer some of the following:

Is it an "all or nothing" proposition? Is killing another sentient being for our comfort and appetite immoral under all circumstances?

Does the mere fact of eating amount to immorality or is the suffering of the animal the more important issue?

Does eating less meat and therefore killing fewer animals count for moral Brownie points? Do waste and over indulgence count towards immorality of meat eating? (the US population will fail miserably)

Does the "life" of the slaughtered animal matter - (free grazing vs factory farmed) as much as its death?

Do "compassionate" killing methods count in alleviating the moral pangs?

If we ate the meat of an animal that died "accidentally" without any affirmative killing agent involved, is that ethical?

Why can't we eat our dogs and cats but can slaughter the chicken and cows in the backyard who too can become like our pets when we take care of them?

Should we look upon ourselves as biologically inclined meat eaters like many other carnivores / omnivores and merely accept our place in the food chain? Or are humans, as highly evolved beings with ethics and morality a significant guiding principle in the thought process, be able to buck our "natural" inclinations and formulate our eating habits to accommodate the rights of other animals?

As an animal lover I have oftentimes grappled with the above thoughts. I have answers to some and not to others. But I continue to eat meat. If some day, the fact of another animal dying (being killed) for my food starts to weigh too much on my conscience, I will indeed become a vegetarian. And if I do, one particular veggie will definitely figure prominently on my menu. That vegetable is bitter melon or karela (in Hindi), a delicacy in some parts of the world, mostly in Asia. Not everyone can stand the taste of it, some not even when it is disguised with spices and other ingredients. The second post on 3QD is about this very same bitter item of food. Author Aditya Dev Sood waxes philosophical on why some among us would choose not only to eat but thoroughly enjoy something that by normal standards of palatability, should be quite unpalatable.

Karela is a truly bitter vegetable and the taste is somewhat acquired or perhaps one has a genetic predisposition to enjoying it or not. I myself have loved it from early childhood, when most children reject bitter, to the astonishment of adults. I enjoy almost all the ways the vegetable is prepared. I can even eat it plain, just boiled with a sprinkling of salt. My husband on the other hand, can only consume a few mouthfuls even when it is spiced up. If any uninitiated reader would like to try it, I will present here a few tips and recipes for consuming karela.

First, a quick guide to karela buying. There are two varieties of the vegetable. The Chinese variety features larger, smoother gourds which are less bitter and less delicious to my bitter loving palate. It is more widely available both in Asian markets as well as in the produce section of large grocery stores. The Indian variety is smaller, crunchier and more bristly looking (see photos of both varieties in the Wiki link). Usually, only Indian or Pakistani stores carry the Indian variety. Also, the Indian bitter gourd is decidedly more bitter and truer to the karela taste that I crave. If you have never tasted the veggie, you may wish to begin with the less bitter Chinese variety.

April 14, 2009

I have never been impressed by overly sensual/ carnal language applied to food. I know, I know, sex too is a natural appetite and lust and gluttony can describe urges both above and below the belt. But for some reason, calling a piece of chocolate cake "sinfully delicious" doesn't make me want to eat it more. So it was not a surprise that I found the following article about marketing a burger with overt sexual imagery quite annoying.

When I watch the Carl's Jr. commercial featuring "Top Chef" host and mega-model Padma Lakshmi make hot sweet love to a Western Bacon Cheeseburger, I have many thoughts, some of which, I confess, are not entirely to my credit. The spot features the former Mrs. Salman Rushdie sitting on a brownstone stoop in a clingy sundress hiked up mid-thigh, cramming the giant burger into her educated maw and sucking barbecue sauce from her fingers and wrists. Let's not mince onions here: This is sex with a burger.

You might think that here, at last, television advertising might have crossed some sort of debauched Rubicon, or at least some tripwire at the Federal Communications Commission. Not even close. It's merely the latest chapter in the weird mash-up between sex and diabolically unhealthful fast food.

What gives?

Go ahead and read the whole unappetizing story and take a good look at the model, Padma Lakshmi aka ex-Mrs. Salman Rushdie #4. The only sentence you need to pay attention to is the one at the very end.

And so you have the impossibly lean and beautiful Lakshmi wolfing down a 1,000-calorie burger. Now that's hard to swallow.

April 08, 2009

I am not an observant Jew. To put it more succinctly, I am not Jewish at all. Yet I look forward to Passover each year for one gastronomic reason - kosher Coca-Cola. I am not much of a soft drink lover either, tea and water being my beverages of choice. But when I do drink soda, I prefer ice cold Classic Coke or regular Pepsi to anything else. Both are familiar soft drinks of my childhood in India - delicious tingling beverages that brought much relief on hot sunny days at home, in restaurants or by the shack of a road side vendor.

I was not aware that kosher dietary laws extend to soft drinks until just a few years ago (probably 2001 or 2002). During the Passover week that year, I happened to pass a special table displaying kosher goods for the upcoming holiday at my local grocery store and noticed 2 liter bottles of Coke with distinctive yellow caps among the items. I brought one home purely out of curiosity. It turned out to be a pleasant surprise - it tasted like real Coke, a nostalgic taste no longer found in the modern incarnation of the drink. Having never paid any attention to the ingredients in Coca-Cola, I had no idea why the kosher cola tasted so much better than the ordinary variety. A Jewish friend shed light on the mystery. Kosher Coke is made with sugar - it is indeed the Real Thing. In the mid '80s the Coca-Cola company led the way in switching to high fructose corn syrup as sweetener for soft drinks, ditching real sugar from the ingredients. No wonder the kosher Coke tasted so good - it invoked the happy times of youth. Since then every Passover season, I keep an eye out for this rare commodity - kosher Coke is as rare as it is ephemeral. It makes its fleeting appearance for just a few days around this time of the year and if one is not vigilant, it is gone. Last year I missed it. So, I am determined to obtain a couple of bottles this year. I was at the grocery store this morning looking for kosher Coke. It hadn't arrived. I talked to the manager and he assured me that he has some on order and I should check back tomorrow or the day after. Greedy though I am for this special concoction, I only purchase moderate quantities partly out of consideration for Jewish shoppers and partly because 2 liter bottles are not the best option for our household of just two members, neither of whom consumes carbonated drinks in large quantities. Most years I have only managed to find this large sized packaging. Just once, the store also carried cans of kosher Coke which I much prefer.

If you are too young to have ever tasted soft drinks sweetened with sugar and you didn't know about kosher Coke, do try to find some this week and taste the Real Thing. Read more about this special edition of Coca-Cola here.

Note: This post originally appeared on March 18, 2008. I am bringing it to the front for the Passover week that begins today.

April 01, 2009

H2OM- a blessed beverage, Intentional Chocolate - a snack that is "imbued" with a monk's meditation, Creo Mundi - a protein mix that has been praised loudly. How much will you pay for these "good feeling" (not just feel good) foods? An article in the latest issue of Time magazine reports that some are shelling out generously for foods which are embedded / infused / imbued with good intentions, on the assumption that nourishing powers of edibles are enhanced by good thoughts.

Move over, organic, fair trade and free range--the latest in enlightened edibles is here: food with "embedded" positive intentions. While the idea isn't new--cultures like the Navajo have been doing it for centuries--for-profit companies in the U.S. and Canada are catching on, infusing products with good vibes through meditation, prayer and even music. Since 2006, California company H2Om has sold water infused with wishes for "love," "joy" and "perfect health" via the words, symbols and colors on the label (which "create a specific vibratory frequency," according to co-founder Sandy Fox) and the restorative music played at their bottling warehouse. At Creo Mundi, a Canadian maker of protein powder, employees gather around each shipment and state aloud the benefits they hope to imbue it with for their consumers--increased performance, balance and vitality. Intentional Chocolate, founded in 2007 by chocolatier Jim Walsh, uses a special recording device to capture the electromagnetic brain waves of meditating Tibetan monks; Walsh then exposes his confections to the recording for five days per batch.

We hear your eyes rolling. But some claim there's actually something to the idea that humans can alter the physical world with their minds, and they offer research to prove it. Dean Radin, a senior scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences in Petaluma, Calif., conducted a test in which, he says, subjects who ate Intentional Chocolate improved their mood 67% compared with people who ate regular chocolate. "If the Pope blessed water, everyone wants that water. But does it actually do something?" Radin asks. "The answer is yes, to a small extent."

James Fallon, a professor of psychiatry and human behavior at the University of California at Irvine School of Medicine, is skeptical. "So I take a rutabaga and put it close to my head, and it somehow changes the food and improves the mood of the person who ate it?" he asks. "Nah."

Gimmick or not, in this economy any product that promises a spiritual pick-me-up could be in high demand. Since the recession, says Phil Lempert, editor of health-food site Supermarketguru.com "everyone is ready to jump off a bridge." With the right marketing, he says, embedded foods "could be huge."

Still, not everyone is keen on the idea of packaging spirituality. Once the profit motive comes into play, "it's difficult to keep things pure," says George Churinoff, a monk at Deer Park Buddhist Center in Oregon, Wis., who was involved with Intentional Chocolate in its early stages. "Then [the product] may not be blessed in any way with motivation except maybe to make money."

Like the Navajos, I too grew up in a culture where food is routinely imbued with spirituality and blessings, not so much by humans but by gods. (see prasad) I have therefore consumed large quantities of "embedded" foods, mostly from the household shrines of my mother and other relatives. The divine fare was always delicious and I don't know if the goodies imparted any special benefits because of the worthy intentions infused in them. I however remember my mildly observant but supremely hygienic mother's cautionary words regarding the consumption of blessed foods outside the home : "Eat only the whole fruits, not the sliced ones; take very small amounts of cooked food and only if it is still warm; stick mostly to dry items; avoid all cold liquids, milk based products and especially the holy water; do not consume anything in a large communal place of worship." I may have ignored her advice a couple of times - once for a delectable helping of suji halwa in a large, crowded Gurudwara and on another occasion, when I ate some pre-sliced coconut in a South Indian temple. Given the frequent cases of food poisoning, hepatitis and other nasty outcomes of eating in public holy places, it was amply clear to me that the blessings of the gods didn't always protect against earthly maladies.

The foods described in the Time magazine article of course pose few such disease causing threats. What is suspect is their ability to transmit the good intentions and peaceful vibes via the gastrointestinal pathway. If a controlled study can be done to prove their efficacy, perhaps such fare can be of greater use than just soothing the nerves of antsy individuals. How about India and Pakistan sharing "laddus" of peace? Israelis and Palestinians feasting on falafel of harmony? The whole world exchanging grains of accord and amity? The placebo effect alone may be worth the trouble.

February 04, 2009

There may be many a slip between the cup and the lip. But do you know that the drinking cup is etymologically a close cousin of the skull? I did but that knowledge is tucked away in a distant enough corner of the brain that it doesn't color the way I look at my tea cup.

I am an avid tea drinker. I like "real" tea - the slightly acrid and soothing liquor made with tea leaves, both black and green. I drink the former with milk and the latter without. Not for me the new age concoctions contaminated with orange, lemon, pomegranate, elderberry, wild flowers and other unnecessary flavors although I do occasionally enjoy jasmine, ginger, chamomile, mint, Indian chai masala or a few strands of saffron in my brew. But mostly, I like to partake of the undiluted version of the beverage. There is no special tea ceremony in our home. The kettle is put to boil whenever the craving strikes for a hot refreshing cuppa.

I grew up around copious tea drinkers. Tea was served all year round at breakfast, at afternoon teatime and when guests came. Though not particularly tempted as a child to drink the beverage of the adults, I was nevertheless fascinated by the paraphernelia of the tea tray. My mother owned three sets of tea service made of fine English bone china. They were part of her bridal trousseau - gifts from her father. One was an elegant and sedate cream color set with green and gold edging. Another, a dainty design of pink roses on pristine white. The third, my childhood favorite, consisted of a very round teapot surrounded by globular tea cups of impossibly thin and exquisitely translucent beige china festooned with tiny red, deep blue and gold birds, flowers and berries. Although I did not start drinking tea regularly until I entered college, the sight of the steaming amber-gold liquid being poured from one of the gorgeous teapots into a waiting cup was an aesthetic experience even my childish eyes could appreciate.

Perhaps it says something about my austere mother's indifference to material possessions that those beautiful pieces, an anomaly in our otherwise un-ostentatious Bengali kitchen, were not stowed away in a cupboard for special occasions but put to daily use by the family as well as guests who regularly dropped by for a cup of tea. It is therefore not surprising that most of the tea cups and pots from the collection were gone by the time I began drinking tea in my late teen years. Isolated pieces of the beautiful china remained - a few cups and saucers, a mate-less creamer from one set and an unmatched sugar bowl from another. The teapots were all gone - chipped, cracked or broken due to years of use and careless handling. We then drank tea from non-descript ceramic cups and tea pots. No one bothered to go out and shop for good china. When I earned my first pay check, I bought my mother a set of eight cups and saucers (no teapot, creamer or sugar bowl) made of locally produced bone china. They were not half as elegant as my mother's old collection but she accepted the replacements with whole hearted enthusiasm.

As a person who loves tea and tea sets, I do own some nice tea cups and mugs. But sadly, my kitchen pantry is currently devoid of a good china / clay teapot. I have owned a few ceramic and clay ones since I set up independent house keeping after marriage. They were all traditionally attractive, affordable and eminently serviceable fat bellied pots. They are now gone and I currently own a few glass, stainless steel and pewter ones. My "formal" dinner set did not come with a teapot. By the time I went back and searched in a catalog of Mikasa's line of accessories, the design had been discontinued. I never got around to buying a suitable tea pot to go with the set. Perhaps this nostalgic blather will act as an impetus to begin a new search.

My sudden outpourings about tea, teapots and cups was set in motion by an excellent article, Fragments of Bone and Clay by Aditya Dev Sood, a new writer at 3 Quarks Daily. Among other observations about the culture of tea drinking, Aditya goes into deep musings over bone china and the the drinking cup.

The form of a teacup awaits and anticipates its human users with intimacy, affording a second finger leverage, varieties of opposition for the thumb, and of course, that slippery kiss. But it has still more intimate links with the human body: the word ‘cup’ has Indo-European roots, being linked to cupola, as in dome, as well as the Latin cephalus and the Sanskrit kapala, both cognate words for skull. The kapalika-s, of course, are members of that now nearly extinct sect of Saivism, who carry around a human skull, from which they both eat and drink. I believe it is a false calumny that their skull belongs to someone they have killed, but rather that their purpose is, like Hamlet, to be in proximity and awareness of death, the better to feel their own quickness and capacity for live action. How much does it matter whether one’s cup be found whole in nature or be crafted by human hands? Whether it be a human relic or a fine puree of mammalian bones? The important thing is that a cup can serve as a means for dialogue, for silent communion, for mutuality and shared sustenance.

January 30, 2009

I imagine the same questions are racing through your brilliant mind as were racing through mine on that fateful day. What is this? Why have I been given it? What have I done to deserve this? And, which one is the starter, which one is the desert?

You don’t get to a position like yours Richard with anything less than a generous sprinkling of observational power so I KNOW you will have spotted the tomato next to the two yellow shafts of sponge on the left. Yes, it’s next to the sponge shaft without the green paste. That’s got to be the clue hasn’t it. No sane person would serve a desert with a tomato would they. Well answer me this Richard, what sort of animal would serve a desert with peas in:"

The apoplectic passenger who composed the above is the next James Beard awardee for food writing, for sure.

December 19, 2008

During my Ph.D. program, there were two important premises that kept recurring throughout the 7 year process:

1) There is no thought outside narrative -- rather than escape a mythical way of thinking to truly "see reality," we can only move from one "prison-house of language" to another.

2) Stay away from the cheap wine at Trader Joe's -- you get what you pay for.

But in the grand tradition of passing knowledge between generations, I'd like to direct current grad students to this report in The New Scientist, suggesting that exposing new wine to electrical fields can help speed up the aging process. The electricity causes the acids in the wine to react with the alcohol more quickly, getting rid of some of the nasty-tasting long proteins and aldehydes, while creating some of the esters and free amino acids that give particular wines distinctiveness.

No word on whether passing a grad student through a pair of high-voltage electrodes will speed the dissertation process though.

November 29, 2008

(In which we look again at the prevalence of melamine in various food chains, now confirmed to include human babies of practically all countries that use infant formulas from multinational companies like Nestle and Bristol-Meyers Squibb.)

September 18, 2008

Every few months, along with the water bill, I receive a little brochure from the water company that assures me that the level of coliform and fecal bacteria in the water that flows through the taps has been tested at well below required levels. Ditto for the amounts of lead and other heavy metals and nitrates. One important missing category, however, is the residues of pharmaceuticals which have been dumped or excreted into the water sources.This article gives an indication of the effects of these pharmaceuticals making it into the water supply:

Pharmaceuticals have since been found in treated sewage effluents,
surface waters, soil, and tap water, though at very low levels (parts
per trillion, ppt). These levels are unable to induce acute effects in
humans, i.e., they're far below the recommended prescription dose, but
have been found to affect aquatic ecosystems. To date, most attention
has been focused on hormone disruption in fish due to pharmaceutical
estrogens present in the environment, and the rise of bacterial
pathogens resistant to conventional antibiotic treatment due, in part,
to their exposure to sub-lethal levels of antibiotics in their
environment. Antibiotics and estrogens are only two of many
pharmaceuticals suspected of persisting in the environment either due
to their inability to naturally biodegrade or continued prevalence as a
result of continuous release. Other studies have shown antidepressants
to trigger premature spawning in shellfish while drugs designed to
treat heart ailments block the ability of fish to repair damaged fins.

Recent monitoring studies fail to address one question: Are the
levels of pharmaceuticals in the environment significant? At first
glance, one would say 'no' since levels found in the environment are
six to seven orders of magnitude lower than therapeutic doses in spite
of the fact up to 90 percent of an oral drug can be excreted in human
waste. Low and consistent exposures wouldn't likely produce acute,
notable effects but rather subtle impacts such as behavioral or
reproductive effects that could very well go unnoticed. The good news
is any threat to human health is probably not imminent but rather
long-term.

So it's not merely the direct route from adulteration of food products such as melamine in pet food and now, Chinese infant formula and milk, or the long-term effect of Bisphenol A used in polycarbonate plastics that is associated with an increase in heart disease and diabetes, apart from phytoestrogenic effects.

Wonder chemicals and drugs are the double-edged sword of modern life. There is probably little we can do to reduce our exposure to these, no matter how hard we might try to avoid it by going 'green', switching to bottled water (bisphenol exposure, anyone?) or switching to organic/hormone free food only.

June 11, 2008

If you are, like me, bemoaning the costs of your regular groceries due to the uptick in oil and gasoline prices, be prepared for worse this coming fall.

Driving through rural Illinois and Iowa over the Memorial Day weekend, I was shocked to see vast stretches of unplanted corn fields. Very few had a faint fuzz of sprouting seedlings. I was puzzled: I had been assured of what a spectacular sight they would be, and had at least hopes of seeing growing crops, even if they wouldn't be anywhere as large as they would be at harvest time.

May 05, 2008

Food personalityAndrew Zimmern was recently in Delhi - to eat, eat and eat! He ate a lot, at a lot of different places - glittering dining destinations in posh New Delhi restaurants, traditional eateries in the dingy alley ways of Old Delhi, roadside stalls and confectionery and even sacred temple offerings in a Gurdwara. He tasted everything - the hot, the sweet and the tangy. With able guidance from food aficionados, Zimmern sampled cuisines from many parts of India- from soup to nut to ... tree bark. And he ate and ate and ate. (I sure hope he was packing a generous supply of Pepto-Bismol)

Zimmern has enthusiastically chronicled his experience of eating (pigging?) out in Delhi at his blog Bizarre Foods. Some excerpts:

Delhi is the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world going back at least 2500 years. The ruins of 7 cities have been discovered here, and it is said that Delhi’s food is often descended from that of the mediaeval lashkars garrisoned around the forts of the capital. But today, Shahjahanabad, or Old Delhi is home to an army of office-goers and shopkeepers who trade in everything from spices to bridal trousseaux to electrical fittings. If you venture to untangle the streets that twist and turn from dark alleys into busy boulevards, you are likely to find an inevitable surprise lurking around the corner, at least that’s what my new pal Hemanshu Kumar, a college Economics professor who is also the titular head of Eating Out in Delhi, a local club always in search of the most interesting and most bizarre food in town. Today, The Professor and I went on a search for the nearly extinct and increasingly overlooked traditional foods that can only be found on a dedicated filed trip. We found spiced milk froth, tiny Nihari stands, and anything else that popped up, like fruity sandwiches that reside in a shop behind large iron gates on Chawri Bazaar Road--- made from pomegranate (anaar) or apples and paneer (Indian cottage cheese made from curdled milk) lathered in orange marmalade, then dusted with secret masala and anaar seeds all on white bread.

I am particularly pleased that Zimmern didn't depart Delhi by sampling just the customary north Indian fare of saffron rice, nan bread, creamy gravies and meat kebabs. He wisely checked out the food in a new Bengali restaurant in Delhi (a must for me next time I am there). I have said here before that Bengali cuisine, the food that was cooked in my parents' home, is a distinct cooking style dominated by fish (including sea food), rice, vegetables and a dazzling array of desserts. It is not served in most Indian restaurants. Bengalis eat meat too but consume it in lesser quantities than fish. (In our home, we ate meat every Sunday and on holidays). The food flavors are varied and subtle and the sauces lighter in body than in north Indian preparations - one size does not fit all. Along with the ubiquitous Indian spice mixes of onion, garlic, cumin, coriander, cardamom, cinnamon and clove, which are used judiciously, Bengali cooks artfully mix and match ginger roots, bay leaves, hot green chili, fresh coconuts, poppy, mustard and nigella seeds in their culinary creations. Also, alongside the more common vegetables and fruits, Bengalis are known to transform a whole host of unusual roots, leaves and even tree barks into mouthwatering dishes. In his post Zimmern mentions the delightful experience of eating bananas .... or rather, the whole banana tree, at New Delhi's fancy and gastronomically ambitious Bengali restaurant, Oh! Calcutta.

May 01, 2008

As I noted in an earlier post, there is widespread speculation in the media about the link between rising food prices and diverting food grains for the manufacture of biofuels. The Washington Post has begun a series to examine the various posssible causes that have triggered the recent world food crisis. Wednesday's featured article takes a closer look at food and fuel. There was another related story in the paper that also caught my eye. That one reports that the spike in food prices has affected not only man and beast but even the godsmust put up with hunger pangs - at least, in India.

NEW DELHI -- Every morning, Hindu devotees haul buckets of fresh, creamy milk into this neighborhood temple, then close their eyes and bow in prayer as the milk is used to bathe a Hindu deity. At the foot of the statue, they leave small baskets of bananas, coconuts, incense sticks and marigolds.

With prices soaring for staples such as cooking oils, wheat, lentils, milk and rice across the globe, priests like Atrey say they are seeing the consequences in their neighborhood temples, where even the poorest of the poor have long made donations to honor their faith.

"But today the common man is tortured by the increases in prices," Atrey lamented during one early morning prayer, or puja, adding that donations of milk were down by as much as 50 percent. He had recently met with colleagues from other temples, along with imams from local mosques, who reported similar experiences. "If poor people don't even have enough for bread, how will they donate milk to the gods?" he said. "This is very serious."

From Haiti to Senegal to Thailand, prices for basic food supplies have skyrocketed in recent months. The increases have been attributed to a confluence of factors including sharply rising fuel prices, droughts in food-producing countries and the diversion of some crops to produce biofuels. In India, milk prices rose because of increases in gasoline prices, which made it more expensive to transport the product from dairy farms to cities.

The food shortage and high prices are naturally a cause of great worry for families, especially those with children. But what about the gods? Some Indian Vedic gods, like their Greek counterparts are known to enjoy alcoholic beverages. Until the milk shortage disappears, could they be propitiated with another liquid offering - ethanol from corn?